


Wake through the dark side

by Spylace



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Blood and Violence, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Body Modification, Brainwashing, Double Agents, Gen, Mutilation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Team Bonding, Team Feels, violence in general
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-10-16 21:17:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10579656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: The five times Sombra hacks Reaper.





	1. Chapter 1

“Gently—I said gentle!” Sombra hissed when Reaper tore the metal like cardboard with his silver-tipped claws. He grunted and stared down in annoyance when she punched him in his side, smoke flickering around the edge of his mask in a way that never failed to pop goosepimples in her flesh.

Just because she used to roll with _Los Muertos_ didn’t mean she ever got used to being on the front lines. And considering what Reaper had been doing—what he’d been _eating_ —in the hallway she felt a certain amount of wariness was justified. A healthy sense of self-preservation and all that. It was why she liked to work behind the scenes, safe behind an array of monitors that showed her everything she needed to know without ever getting her hands dirty.

This job would have been easy-peasy if it hadn’t been for the tiny fact she landed wrong when the security began slinging bullets. Despite the stab of analgesic in her right elbow, pain radiated down from her shoulders in nauseating waves. But she fought to keep her footing and got to work. She swiped her cybernetic gloves across the servers. The lights blinked out one by one. 

Talon would not forgive her if she failed. It was one thing to let her _amiga_ Volskaya go; it was quite another if she failed to acquire the information she told Talon they would need for their latest plan to upset Overwatch. She was not like the Widowmaker who had the personality of a burnt toast. Nor was she Reaper who was a caricature of what a real person might be like.

Sombra had plans. Plans far greater than life as a Talon mercenary.

“Sombra.” Reaper growled. “Do you have it?”

Smoke curled around him like an angry swarm of bees. In spite of herself, she flinched. She’d heard of Reaper’s reputation. Who hadn’t in Talon? She knew that anyone who got in his way ended up dead, or worse. Worse meant that there wouldn’t even be a body left to bury and whichever sucker that was in charge of taking role call would quietly cross out the names on the screen.

Her predecessor had gone out like that. Or so she’d been told.

She lifted her lips in a delicate snarl.

“Relax viejo, we’ve got time.”

As though to contradict her, their communicators crackled to life.

“We have been made.” Widowmaker said, her voice as smooth as honey over the static. Interference. Their target had known they were coming. “I will start count.”

She cursed.

“Sombra.” Reaper said again. “Where is the data?”

“I’ll know when I find it.” She said sulkily, pouring over information only she could see, touch, smell and feel.

Reaper brooded for a moment before demanding, "Show me." 

She turned around to protest then stopped. 

Reaper held out an arm. The smoke furled thicker the further he held the limb away from his body. She was surprised that it had not fallen off at the wrist.

"My body is made of nanites chica." She knew that. It just took a moment for the implication to sink in. 

"Don't tell me you can't do it." Reaper taunted.

Her eyebrows knitted across her forehead. The question 'why' hung from the tip of her tongue.

“Of course I can.” She snapped.

“Go on then." Reaper sneered. "I trust you.”

Sombra let out a snort of disbelief but Reaper did not budge. He spread his hand, chasing smoke like she had seen her _familia_ chase dragons into the dark. He paused when she clamped down on his wrist, her cybernetic gloves neon violet at the seams. 

Atoms parted from his bones, pulsed, and clamored furiously as they broke him down and built him back up in the single breath it took for him to expel air. The information jumped at her. Reaper was. His body was a swarm of nanites, from the top of his head to his tippy-toes. She could see the nanites gnaw at the fringes of his trench coat like it was food, deliberately avoid his mask because it wasn't.

The nanites spun as though flung through a particle collider when they downloaded new data, new parameters and a new set of rules. She clumsily cupped her hands trying to keep hold of him when he spilled through her fingers like textured ink. Tendrils looped around her ankles but it wasn't cold. Reaper was surprisingly warm.

Following her directions, he began sliding in and out of server racks until she made him stop. Her satisfaction echoed in him when he located the correct drive, far left corner, fifth from the floor. 

‘Is this it?’

‘Yes, now come back.’

Sombra felt anxious though she could not for the life of her explain why. Her emotions pinged him and he returned the query with uncertainty. Securing the drive in himself, he crashed through the rows of servers. 

She swore, fraught, as she untangled them from the feedback. Reaper was a ball of nanites in her lap. She could have done anything with him. Taken him from Talon. Made him hers. 

Somehow, it scared her more than anything.

Widowmaker was a doll to be moved and pushed around. In comparison, Reaper was a sand castle. A sudden wave could carry off his tall towers and his golden walls and it wouldn't matter. He couldn't care.

"Viejo." She said when he finally reformed, heavy trench billowing dramatically behind him as he shot a neat hole into the oncoming security.

The nanites weren't right but they weren't wrong. The little bastards had been programmed to heal a body. Reaper had no body and it was a mess. She had shared minds with an omnic once and couldn’t even begin to explain how everything functioned.

If it hadn’t been for the heavily redacted files Talon kept on him, she wouldn’t have thought Reaper started out human.

“Are we done here?” He said.

“Si.” She replied, subdued.

He nodded once.

“Let’s go.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Reaper rolled across the tiles in ropes of thick, black smoke. An unsuspecting Talon agent let out a horrified wail before diving ass-first into the kitchen sink, kicking all manners of cutlery, dishware and soap suds onto the floor.

The nanites whispered in excitement when they found remnants of egg yolk caught on a spoon. The constant whirling sounded like a barbed feather across the window and Sombra could not help but grit her teeth because she now recognized the sound as pain.

The nanites needed fuel in order to function. Their fuel was Reaper. She threw Reaper a look of pure poison when he built himself back up on faded limbs. She’d purged the cache of data on her gloves five times already but could not rid herself of the residual feedback. A skein of oil that refused to go away with hot water and elbow grease.

Reaper had no right to look so content as he brooded over her boiling kettle. His tall form flickered against the spouts of steam.

“Don’t touch that.” Sombra snapped because she wasn’t sympathizing with her teammate, she wasn’t.

What had been done to Reaper was infinitely worse than anything she’d ever known. It changed nothing. He was just means to an end.

“Where is your guero?” Sombra said sulkily and Reaper paused, the nanites coming to an arrest midair. He turned to her in his bone-white mask and she regretted speaking up at all.

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“What good does that do me?”

Reaper shook. Handfuls of nanites scattering across the floor.

It was laughter. Reaper was laughing.

“That’s my little shadow.”

 

Sombra sprinted down the corridors as Reaper shot and shot and shot. He wrapped around her like a black shroud and she felt him bleed around the nodes on her skin.

Their mission was a bust even before they started.

How had they known they were coming? Once was an accident. Twice was a coincidence. Three times was setting a dangerous precedent.

Reaper could have easily escaped. Leave Sombra to the guards’ tender mercies. They had what they came for. She would simply be collateral. There were other hackers. A few good as her. Some better suited for Talon’s yoke.

But Reaper knew what Junkers did to thieves. It would have been kindness to put a bullet in her before he left. He did neither. Reaper did not leave her.

She felt him seethe as he helped her push a door aside and slide it back, crushing a man’s groping fingers against the heavy metal. Sombra flinched at the blood-curdling scream and broke into a run. She was getting sick of seeing blood.

“What century,” She huffed. “Do they think we’re living in?”

She tugged at the lever. It didn’t budge. With a growl, Reaper kicked it sideways and thankfully not in two. The door opened with a groan. A tired sound which told her that it hadn’t been used in a very long time.

“It’s post-omnic architecture.” Reaper wheezed. “We survived.”

Because ropes and pulleys could not be hacked.

Sombra muttered something rude under her breath. She heard footsteps. Echoes of echoes transmitted by the nanites Reaper shed during their flight. They reached a dead end. Reaper peeled from her as he took his shotguns out.

“Get the door open.”

She’d have to find it first. Where was it? She scraped her nails down the seams of the wall, looking for a way out. She knew there was one; she’d seen the blueprint. Junkers weren’t stupid enough not to have a backup plan.

Reaper grunted as his body absorbed rapid bursts. No shell casing touched her but she could feel every bullet hit in the way he began coughing up smoke and spill swarms of nanites across her knees. The nanites whirred as they sawed into Reaper’s body. Reaper did not have long. Sombra dug her fingers against his side. The curious nanites collapsed around her fist, losing cohesion as quickly as they lost mass.

“Do you trust me?” Sombra demanded.

Reaper did not hesitate. Maybe it would have been better if he had. Because this trust meant that they were a team. She did not need a team.

She put her hand through him and rearranged him as she would bits of code. A temporary solution by concentrating his mass to form a titanium skin. He felt so much. She felt angry. For him. He was human once. She shouldn’t have been able to do it. And that made her madder than a bee in a bonnet. She wanted to hurt whoever it was that had done it to him. Had been doing it to him. Sombra would have said more had she not been using Reaper as a literal meat-shield.

“Hold on viejo, I’m almost done.” She found a hidden switch and punched it.

Reaper did not answer. He no longer had vocal chords.

A panel opened on top of the ceiling. Without a second look, he threw her in the air. She let out an ungrateful screech when she landed, half-hanging from the skylight.

“Come on!” She shouted at Reaper, reaching out with a hand.

Her tights tore as she was pushed upwards.

She saw Reaper touch the switch.

“ _Later_.”

 

Later much later, days later when she knew Talon would not be kind to his absence, his secret rendezvous where anyone could have seen, tracked and reported to their superiors that Reaper was a traitor, he trickled back in their safe house. Widowmaker watched in subdued interest as the line of ants jostled at Sombra’s feet. Sombra knelt, trying to gather the nanites into a ball.

“Pinche idiota.” She swore. “Que te folle un pez.”

She lowered her head as though trying to breathe him in. A benediction of sorts, a kiss where there would have been an approximation of a head.

“Gracias papi.”


	3. Chapter 3

Something had changed between Reaper and Sombra. She did not dislike it. It was a deep-seated unease. A kink in the fabric of her universe. Reaper of the past was driven. Focused.

He changed.

She did not like change; she did not like change like she did not like the pallor of her skin and how blue it appeared against her uniform. She did not like how sometimes Reaper reached out for the girl, Sombra, his flesh parting into smoke.

They were not lovers. She would have—she would _know_. They were not lovers. Reaper and Sombra were acting the part of father and daughter. In their last mission, Reaper had trickled back lazily in a stream of black sand. Sombra poured him into a jar before whisking him away into her workshop. Even when Reaper stood tall, easily double her height, Sombra fussed over him like he was something fragile. She could not miss what she couldn’t remember but this. She felt the emptiness squeeze her ribs.

The target was in her sights. She pulled the trigger and her left leg blew off at the knee. The two things were not correlated. She landed in a pile of rubble, air knocked from her as she raised her head, trying to see what she had missed.

She saw blood.

Sombra pounced on her with bandages and first aid as Reaper easily ripped her would-be-assassin apart. The needle barely pricked her flesh before being pulled away. Already, the blood around her stump had congealed to black scabs.

“You look terrible araña.” Sombra said, smug surety wiped from her face. There was more blood than she thought. It was everywhere. Caught between her teeth, between her fingers, in Sombra’s hair.

Another mission failure.

If she could feel fear, she would have been shivering with it. Neither she nor ~~Gabriel~~ Reaper would get off lightly this time—if she survived at all.

Oddly, the sense of her own mortality did not bother her. Reaper set her amputated leg next to her stump, mangled but intact. Muscles still twitching where the nerves sought connection with her soft brain.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” She demurred.

Reaper did not answer her.

“Sombra.” He grated.

“No!” A burst of gunfire punctuated the girl’s protest.

If she hadn’t known any better, she would have said Reaper looked amused.

“You will not help your amiga?”

“She will _tell_.”

She felt offended. She was no storyteller. There were no stories in her.

She laid her head back. It was cold. She could run across London rooftops in her tights but here, surrounded by the very few she could tolerate, she felt cold.

When she looked down again, at her knee with nothing underneath, Sombra was touching her. Her gloves winked violet, warm against her pale thighs. Smoke shrouded her lower body in silk. The swarm knitted the blue flesh together as Reaper waver, losing mass in his shoulders before collapsing.

Sombra hissed and he reformed, fainter than he had been before. As though there wasn’t enough to tether him to this plane. She did not believe in God. Talon was the only constant in her life. But a prayer welled up in her throat. Words that hadn’t been heard since she stabbed her husband to death in their marital bed.

“ _Mon Dieu, j'ai un très grand regret de Vous avoir offense..._ ”

Reaper growled. “ _Y yo te absuelvo de tus pecados en el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo. Amén_.”

 

Her leg was omitted from the report. She felt that this was right but could not for the life of her say why.

“Why?” It was one word. She could not form the question. She shouldn’t have said it out loud.

“...It was a lovely leg.”

The answer bothered and confused her. She wasn’t sure if it was because Reaper professed interest at all or the fact she was pleased by the compliment.

There was nothing more to say.

He nodded and left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm 99% sure there is a mouse in my room. Off-topic but true.


	4. Chapter 4

He couldn’t move.

It was a testament to Talon’s anger that they would damage him like this. He laid on the table helpless as Sombra skipped into the room, her camouflage peeling off like a second skin. Instinctively, he reached out for her and found that he couldn’t. His arm remained still. The nanites failed to disperse. He could not tell her what he knew and he began to panic.

“Legs.” He grunted, unable to elaborate.

“Mios Dio,” Sombra hissed. “What did they do to you?”

Amalie peered in from the doorway, curious but distant.

Sombra pulled him up as though he weighed nothing. Because at sometimes, he was. “Papi.” She said, hand gliding down the front of his armor. “They left something in you.” And the nanites, encouraged by her attention, surged back to life, moving in a flux around the blunt object that took shape inside his chest.

He heaved but could not force it out. It was coded into him; it was now a part of him.

Resignation settled in his bones, steel-plated like conviction. He leaned forward.  

Amalie took his other arm. She was warm.

 

“A dirty bomb.” Jesse wondered, lighting the tip of a cheap cigar.

“You want them to live, you keep them off the field.”

“But why you?” He squinted at the horizon to gage time. It wouldn’t be long before Lena or Hanzo or godforbid— _Genji_ came after him. He wasn’t one to waste time like this but well, it had been a long time since he and Reaper had a talk.

Reaper sighed.

“Despite my failures, Talon knows that I am the only one capable of infiltrating Gibraltar intact.” There was more of course. Talon had their hold on him. Reaper could not go against direct orders. And Reaper spat, like he was regurgitating something foul, “Winston is a capable leader.”

“Aw shucks, I’m gonna tell ‘im you said that. Sure he’ll be pleased as punch.”

Reaper grunted like he didn’t care.

They had a system of sorts in place. Every once in a while one of them would contact the other and they’d meet up. Touch base, exchange information. Somewhere they were sure they could not be heard. Jesse knew these canyons like the back of his hands. He was still sweaty after scaling the Cliffside and Reaper, well he looked as fresh as a rose. A smoky, scary rose. Real pretty. Picturesque almost.

Jesse bit down on the cigar.

“You’re asking for half the team to stay off the field. That’s a mighty tall order if you don’t mind me sayin’.”

Reaper did not reply. Simply let Jesse talk himself into it. “And you know how Genji is. Ain’t gonna be easy.”

“Nothing’s easy.”

“So I get them off the field. _Stay off_.” Jesse amended when Reaper pinned him with a lazy look.

“I gave you the information. Put it to good use.”

“You trust me.”

“Yes.” Gabriel did at least. Unconditionally. “I cannot bring Talon down alone. But Talon is finished with me. By extension.” Reaper let the sentence hang. He didn’t used to. Jesse’s been noticing more and more that the boogeyman under the mask was still a man. Lots of things changed. Plenty didn’t.

“She killed good people.”

“And every day she sits in a chair to be wiped.”

His answer was warier than Jesse would have liked. It was as though his anger had worn thin on waves. It was no one’s fault except Talon’s. But Talon’s run was at its end. Gabe’s work was finally bearing fruit.

“So that’s it then. You’re done.”

“You seem pleased.” Reaper allowed.

“Sure am. You’re finally coming home jefe—you bet your bottom dollar I’m happy.”

“I’m not the man.” Reaper began to wither. Their time was up. “Who I was.”

“Don’t matter none. We can fix it. Just come _home_.”

Reaper did not reply. He squashed Jesse’s hat down on his head.

“ _Fool_.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a longer, more coherent version but my computer ate it.

They didn’t use it immediately.

He was still sent on missions, hours, days later. Milk runs compared to what he was used to and yet he didn’t delude himself into thinking that they didn’t know that he knew.

And the idea grew into an ouroboros chewing on its fatted tail.

Did they know that he knew that they knew that he knew?

Gibraltar almost came as a relief.

“DIE! DIE! DIE!”

Smoke broiled down his back as Winston leapt through the spray of gunfire like a goddamned _circus_ monkey.

And while he was distracted, Reinhardt landed on top of him steel-plated and armored. He felt the solid metal of his fist as it swept through his middle. The strength in them would have killed a man. He was not a man.

He was...

He was.

It didn’t matter what he was as he discarded his guns. They disintegrated as soon as they touched the ground. The nanites whined at the forced separation and Jesse stopped, kicked himself backwards just before he caught a bullet with his stupid hat and Reaper grunted in bitter satisfaction as he gathered himself into a storm, around the _burden_ the nanites recognized as a part of him.

The men who’d come with him had fled or were dead.

He devoured them quickly, buying time for Sombra who had found something important enough at Gibraltar to stick her neck away from her precious computers. Foolish girl. Foolish child.

As Jesse promised, the omnics were off the field. Phara, Genji, were all aiding in the evacuation.

Jack’s pulse rifle flew harmlessly through him. The junker’s chain hook couldn’t touch him. In his wraith form, he was untouchable. But he was also beginning to tire. He hadn’t known that his body could tire but it did.

Ana skidded behind a corner and took aim.

Amalie, high on the ceiling and hidden from view, fired a warning shot.

Spotting the dim glow of her scope lens, Oxton did an about face and ran through him.

He stopped.

When it hit, the bomb didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel like anything he’d ever known. It was over in a blink of an eye. Everything stopped. He could not move. He could not feel. His shoulders shook. His shotgun disintegrated in the meat of his palms. His hand broke off at the wrist. He knelt, not because his knees bent but because everything was gone beneath.

His limbs splintered and turned to smoke. He fell on his back, seized, arching hard enough to slam the back of his head against the tiles.

Jesse skidded to his side, hat off, eyes wild.

“Shit, _no_.”

As the nanites struggled and failed to recover his body, he choked, gasping in a parody of a living thing. By some terrifying miracle, he could still see. He saw when the mask fell through the ruins of his face, the sunken cheeks, the membrane, and lodged somewhere in the grey matter before clattering hard on the ground.

“Move.” Amalie snarled. She pushed the barrel against his head. At that range, Jesse would be lucky to keep his neck.

“No.” Genji hissed in his mechanized voice. “You move.”

“A _l_ **l** of **_y_ o**u s _h_ u **t** u p.” He said but it came out garbled through smashed teeth. Like tar dribbling from the corner of his lips.

Sombra, sounding like she was underwater, placed a hand on his chest. Where it was before her hand sank through with a sigh. He reached out for her but his body wouldn’t listen. The nanites did not stir. He could not tell her what he wanted to tell her. What he should have told her before this suicide mission.

This was how he died.

He threw his head back and screamed.

 

Stupid. She’d just been away for a bit, inserting a sweet bit of code that would be a nasty shock for Talon when they got around to storming Gibraltar.

She grabbed for him despite guns and blades and a _bow_ pointed every which way. She grabbed a handful of nanites that bleated their hurt before shutting down. She gathered as much as she could but couldn’t do shit. Once upon a time, she’d been afraid that she could change. That she could change _him_.

But Reaper did not respond. Black bones shone under the sterile lights.

Amalie, face twisted in a moue of confusion, tugged at her sleeve.

“We need to leave.”

“We’re not leaving him!”

“Then fix him.”

Sombra was about to snap that she couldn’t. This was more than a matter of turning something on and off again.

_Oh._

She held out a hand. At Oxton, Tracer, whatever.

“Give me the chronal accelerator.”

“Wot?”

“No.” Soldier 76, the hero of Overwatch, Jack Morrison, pushed his way into the circle. “Don’t. You can’t.”

“The _hell_ she can’t.” Jesse breathed, standing up.

The two began to argue. All the while, Oxton stared at her with limpid brown eyes.

“Will it work?”

“I don’t know.”

Oxton shrugged and unlatched the chronal accelerator from her chest.

“Here.” She said with a flourish. Their hands touched briefly. “Try your best.”

Sombra ran a nail around the aluminum rings. She placed it delicately at papi’s middle.

“ _Don’t die_.”

 

It took three men to hold him down—Jesse, Hanzo and Genji.

His first breath was bloody and he coughed up masses of dead nanites as he tried to surge upward. When his body did not disperse, he cursed Genji’s ancestors down to the very first one and the offended look on his brother’s face was almost worth it.

“ _Sombraaa_.” He croaked.

“Jefe?” Jesse asked, sounding like he was about to cry. Disgusted, he pushed the younger man way. Genji was at his side at once.

He could see his hand out in front of him. The one that had fallen off. Its skin brown. Clear of rot and mold. Missing the scar between the third and fourth knuckle. Smooth in a way it hadn’t been since he joined SEP.

He saw Oxton turning the chronal accelerator back in place.

“What did you do?” He turned to Sombra. “What the hell did you do?!”

“I saved your life you stupid, selfish old man!” Sombra spat. “Vete a la verga culero!” Her fist hit the meat of his shoulders again and again and again.

“Talon sent me for a reason. I was supposed to die.” He said dumbly.

“Fuck Talon. You’re not theirs! You’re _mine_ , you hear me viejo?”

He touched his chest. Right beneath the heart.

“You saved my life.”

Sombra sprawled backwards in a huff, ignoring the crows of frenemies.

“Whatever. Don’t let it happen again.”

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't speak Spanish. I barely speak coherent English at the best of times. Jack Morrison and Jesse McCree aren't the names that come to mind when I see the initials JM. And that it just the least of my work-stress.


End file.
